In this study, we used the splitscreen preferential looking paradigm to test 13-, 15-, and 20-month-olds’ developing understanding of simple matrix what-questions of the forms “What hit the X?” (subject-question) and “What did the X hit?” (objectquestion). Infants responded appropriately to subject-questions by 15 months of age, and to both subjectand object-questions by 20 months. At no age di...

We present experimental evidence bearing on Cheng & Rooryk’s (2000) proposal that French wh-in-situ questions are licensed by an intonational morpheme also present in yes-no questions and their claim that such questions are ungrammatical without a rising contour. While most participants produced a rising contour, not all did; when they did, the slope was not as steep as in yes-no questions. Our...

This paper explores two types of interrogative prosody in Yami, an Austronesian language spoken in Taiwan. (Semi-) spontaneous data collected through the Map Task technique [1] were used and acoustic parameters such as pitch accent shapes, boundary tones, pitch range, and speech rate were examined. The results show that all parameters were used to differentiate interrogative prosody in Yami. Th...

Current theories of interrogative syntax/semantics adopt two strategies for the interpretation of in-situ wh-phrases: covert movement and in-situ interpretation. The covert movement strategy is traditionally assumed to be all-or-nothing: the in-situ wh-phrase covertly moves to C or else stays in-situ and is interpreted in its base-generated position at LF. In this paper we argue that neither ap...

It has been observed that wh-questions cannot be joined disjunctively, the suggested reasons being semantic or pragmatic deviance. We argue that wh-question disjunctions are semantically well-formed but are pragmatically deviant outside contexts that license polarity-sensitive (PS) items. In these contexts the pragmatic inadequacy disappears due to a pragmatically induced recalibration of the i...